The Prometheus Unbound of Aeschylus: Rebuilding a Lost Masterpiece

By Carey Jobe

Featured in our New Lyre Winter 2024 issue.

Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus is one of world literature’s best-known plays. We possess it today only because scholars at the Library of Alexandria chose it as one of seven representative Aeschylus plays (out of at least seventy-three) to be copied for libraries and schools—the equivalent of choosing about four of Shakespeare’s plays.  Consequently, it was re-copied in the Byzantine Empire throughout the Middle Ages, long enough for Renaissance humanists to obtain manuscripts that were eventually printed. Aeschylus’ other plays disappeared. We know them today only as titles or in short passages quoted by contemporary authors.   

This was the fate of Prometheus Unbound (Prometheus Lyomenos in Greek), the sequel play to Prometheus Bound (Prometheus Desmotes).  Although not chosen as part of the Aeschylean canon, the Unbound was widely read in antiquity and quoted in literary works that still survive.  As a result, we have enough quotations and other information about this play to form a general idea how its plot and themes progressed. 

Prometheus Unbound carries forward and completes the story of Prometheus begun in Prometheus Bound.  The two plays were intended as a unity; Prometheus Bound cannot be fully understood as Aeschylus intended without some knowledge of its sequel.  In this article, I translate the surviving Greek and Latin passages of the Unbound and assemble them into the framework of a proposed plot.  For the portions of the play where no confirmed passages exist, I used other evidence from classical sources when available and, where all else fails, my poet’s sense of where the play’s momentum is heading.   

What survives of Prometheus Unbound is fascinating.  Studying, translating, and attempting to reassemble its puzzle pieces gave me new respect for Aeschylus as a playwright and for the scope of his dramatic ideas.  In this article I wish to give readers some sense of what I think occurred in this lost play and how it fits into Aeschylus’ concept of the Prometheus myth.  I hope I can give readers new insights into what Aeschylus intended to tell us through the Prometheus story, a story that continues to have relevance for our modern age.    

Background

Before they were ever written down, the tales of Greek mythology were orally transmitted and, over many centuries and in different regions, developed multiple, often conflicting, story lines. These variant tellings gave Greek tragedians considerable freedom in molding these tales to suit their immediate theatrical needs.  They also freely invented their own backstories or new plot twists whenever necessary to convey a moral or just write good theater. This is what Aeschylus did in his handling of the Prometheus story.   

Aeschylus’ Athenian audience would already have been familiar with the Prometheus legend from Hesiod. His Works and Days and Theogony recount how Zeus overthrew his father Cronos for supremacy of the gods in an epic battle against the Titans (the “Titanomachy”).  Following his victory, Zeus banished Cronos and the Titans to Tartarus. He also planned to obliterate humanity to create a new race of people.  Prometheus (whose name means “Forethought”), son of the Titan Iapetus, thwarted this plan by stealing fire from Olympus in a fennel stalk to bestow on mankind. This gift allowed humanity to acquire the skills needed for survival. But Zeus’ punishment was severe. He ordered Hephaistos to chain Prometheus to a cliffside in the remote Caucasian Mountains. He then sent an eagle to consume Prometheus’ liver, which continually regenerated and was reconsumed in an unending cycle.  Ages later, the hero Heracles killed the eagle and freed Prometheus from bondage.  Zeus and Prometheus reconciled.    

Aeschylus made important changes to this fire-legend, all of which enhance the story’s dramatic impact. Prometheus is now the child of Gaia, the Earth Goddess, a primordial deity with knowledge of the hidden workings of fate. (Her divine DNA also readily explains Prometheus’ “forethought”). In Aeschylus’ version, Prometheus was Zeus’ ally in the Titanomachy, and his counsel was decisive in Zeus’ victory. Because Zeus owed his throne to Prometheus, the punishment he later inflicts becomes an especially harsh betrayal. In addition, Prometheus not only grants mankind fire, but also teaches them the arts and sciences, enabling them to develop culture and civilization.  Finally, Prometheus is now possessor of a momentous secret: he knows how Zeus will one day be overthrown, a secret he refuses to disclose even under torture.  (Spoiler: Thetis, with whom Zeus desires an affair, is fated to bear a child greater than his father.)  These reworkings of the legend create a dramatic tension in Bound that ultimately resolves in Unbound. 

Aeschylus’ dramatic concepts were too large for a single play, so he usually wrote plays in trilogies that carried a character or legend through three successive dramas, their tragic intensity subsequently relieved by a comic satyr play.  Prometheus Bound reads like a middle play: the action is already afoot, and the ending is inconclusive. A prelude seems to be called for—a play recounting the theft of fire and Zeus’ apprehension and trial of Prometheus. Yet we have no conclusive evidence from antiquity that a third play existed (or a concluding satyr play). A single line attributed to a play called Prometheus the Fire-Bringer (Pyrphoros) might refer to Prometheus the Fire-Kindler (Pyrkaeos), the satyr play appended to the Persians trilogy in 472 B.C.  These descriptive suffixes were attached to play titles by Alexandrian scholars centuries after Aeschylus lived and were not always uniformly applied.   

Unlike Aeschylus’ other six remaining plays, we have no information for the date of the first production of the Prometheus plays, or if they were ever produced during his lifetime. My impression is that both Bound and Unbound were left on Aeschylus’ desk, more or less complete, when he died in Gela, Sicily, in 456 BC, and that he simply did not live long enough to write a third play. His son Euphorion, also a playwright, could have edited these two plays for a posthumous production in Athens, completing the trilogy with a third play of his own composition. Maybe this play was the shadowy Fire-Bringer.  But we will likely never know the answer, and so must consider Bound and Unbound as a “duology” rather than a trilogy.           

Reconstructing the Play

Prometheus Unbound was written in a structural framework typical of Greek tragedy.  The action was presented in a series of episodes for actors. These episodes were separated by choral hymns sung by an onstage chorus with choreographed dancing and musical accompaniment. The speeches and dialogue of the actors were usually declaimed but sometimes sung to musical accompaniment. In addition to singing hymns functioning as interludes, the chorus also sometimes engaged in dialogues with the characters, but only rarely participated in the action.     

The greatest obstacle in reconstructing Prometheus Unbound is deciding what happened during the parts of the play for which no quotations survive. Almost nothing remains of the choral songs. The middle and concluding episodes are completely blank. For these episodes, even knowing which characters appeared is challenging. In making these difficult surmises, an ancient copyist’s mistake is enormously helpful. The oldest manuscript tradition of Prometheus Bound (the 11^th century Medicean manuscript) contains a dramatis personae that includes Gaia and Heracles, although neither appears in that play. We know from contemporary writers that Heracles appeared in Unbound, so it is thought that the Medicean text tradition inadvertently copies the character list for both plays. Medieval manuscripts are riddled with all sorts of copyist mistakes that hound academicians like Furies in trying to decide what ancient authors actually wrote. This particular error is indispensable in reconstructing Unbound.                    

When the play begins, ages have passed since the end of Prometheus Bound.  Thirteen generations, per Prometheus’ statement in Bound (line 774).  Prometheus remains chained to the Caucasian rocks.  At some point after the first play ended, Zeus sent the divine eagle to consume Prometheus’ liver.  In Aeschylus’ version, this feasting occurs every three days.  The stage would depict the eagle in the background, perched on high rocks, waiting to descend again.  

We do not know if Prometheus Unbound had a prologue. The first lines that we possess are from the chorus that now enters the stage. They are the Titans, the same Titans who battled against Zeus in the Titanomachy and were hurled into Tartarus following their defeat. In an astonishing act of clemency, Zeus has freed the Titans from their imprisonment. The newly-liberated Titans now make the pilgrimage to Caucasia to visit their kinsman Prometheus. 

Judging from the locations mentioned in this fragment, Aeschylus placed the Titans’ exit from Tartarus somewhere south of Egypt in lands the Greeks broadly called “Ethiopia.” These lines from the entrance of the Chorus of Titans describe their route from Tartarus to Caucasia.  

… beyond the Red Sea’s depths 
that glitter like bronze,  
Ethiopia’s sacred river, nourishing all, 
and the circling streams of Ocean  
where all-seeing Helios daily 
bathes his immortal body, 
refreshing his weary horse-teams 
in gentle upwellings of water…   
... by Phasis, rugged border 
of Europe and boundless Asia… 
we come… 
to witness your sufferings, Prometheus, 
the piteousness of your bonds.  

Prometheus then addresses the Titans. His remarkable speech was translated into Latin by the Roman statesman Cicero for the philosophical treatise Tusculan Disputations. The original Greek text is lost. After ages of torture, Prometheus remains defiant, but it is now a defiance mixed with resignation and a longing for an end to suffering:    

Race of Titans, kinsmen of my blood, 
Heaven’s progeny, behold me shackled, bound 
to harsh rocks, like a ship moored fast by sailors 
timid and fearful of night’s thundering sea.  
Zeus, Cronos’ vengeful son, transfixed me thus; 
Hephaistos’ craft then hardened the god’s rage. 
With cruel hands he split my limbs with bolts  
that, by his handiwork, I miserably 
inhabit this bleak stronghold of the Furies. 
Every third dismal day, with dreadful swoop, 
Zeus’ minister, an eagle, with hooked talons 
slashes my liver for its gruesome feast   
until, glutted and stuffed on my fat vitals, 
it utters a horrendous scream and soars 
aloft, its feathered tail fanning my blood. 
Then when my liver swells, regenerating, 
it swoops back hungry for fresh butchery. 
This guardian of my sorrows, whom I nourish, 
consumes me living with unending pain, 
for, as you see, imprisoned in Zeus’ chains 
I cannot hurl this monster from my breast. 
Deprived of any aid, I must endure 
pernicious tortures, yearning for the death 
that ends my woes, yet by the wrath of Zeus,   
despite my wish, I keep this bed of anguish.  
These ancient, grievous torments, magnified 
through horrid ages, fasten on my body 
from which drops, melted by the torrid sun, 
run ceaselessly down the rocks of Caucasus. 

The metaphor comparing the chained Prometheus to a ship moored in a stormy sea is one of the most compelling images in ancient literature.  For me, this speech refutes the claim some make based on “stylometric analysis” that Aeschylus could not have authored the Prometheus plays.  The spirit matters: the grandeur and pathos of Prometheus’ words could only have been written by Aeschylus.  

During a subsequent dialogue with the Titans, Prometheus recounts some of the benefits he bestowed on mankind: 

…Horses, asses I gave them, the race of bulls 
to bear their burdens and relieve their labors.  

A lost choral song by the Titans followed, after which comes a section which, I feel, was the central episode of the play. Gaia, the Earth Goddess and mother of Prometheus, rises from the earth to console and advise her son. A true matriarch, Gaia was ancestor, one way or another, of every divinity in the play—mother of the Titans, grandmother of Zeus, and so on. Her advice would be worth having: she was one of the primal gods, the original deity presiding over the Oracle at Delphi, a prophetess intimately familiar with the workings of fate.   

What did she tell Prometheus? No certain quotations survive, but Prometheus relates in Bound that Gaia often told him the course of future events. We can imagine she did so here, too. But she also worked to shape events. Prometheus also says in Bound that during the war between Cronos and Zeus, Gaia foresaw that victory would be won by strategy (dolos), not by brute force. After the Titans rejected this advice, Gaia and Prometheus shifted their allegiance to Zeus, a switch that was crucial in Zeus’ triumph. This partnership was broken when Prometheus made the decision to steal fire—a personal decision, not fated, as he makes clear. Given Gaia’s active role in creating the Zeus-Prometheus alliance, I expect she would offer Prometheus practical advice how to mend the rift and thereby end his captivity.  

In fact, Prometheus had already foreseen his pardon. He declared in Bound that his release by Zeus was preordained by the Fates, acting on behalf of Necessity (Anake).  The reference to Anake, the Greek goddess Necessity, is significant, for her name was a fearful one.  Necessity was the oldest, most mysterious, most powerful of the primordial Greek gods. Self-created from Chaos, she, along with her consort Time (Chronos—not to be confused with Cronos, father of Zeus), created the cosmos. She carried in her hand a spindle on which she spun the course of future events. Even Zeus was powerless to change what Necessity decreed. Despite being arguably the most powerful deity, Greeks seldom dared to mention her name or even pray to her.  As her verdicts were unalterable, there was no point in making sacrifices to her.  Prometheus had the ability to sense the outline of her plans, but Gaia, the daughter of Necessity, would know those plans in granular detail, and what actions they required. 

We can imagine Gaia explaining the reasons for Zeus’ new-found clemency. An ordered cosmos is guided by principles of justice—brute power alone is unsustainable. Zeus obtained supremacy by force and violence, but he can keep power only by ruling justly. His overthrow is not unalterable fate, however, but depends on actions. Between plays, Zeus must have realized this. During the ages Prometheus was chained to the rock, Zeus softened his harshness and became merciful, as shown by the freeing of the Titans. He has aligned his rule with the cosmic order. Because he now rules justly and wisely, Gaia says, Prometheus’ defiance serves no purpose.  In all creation, now only Prometheus refuses to acknowledge Zeus’ rule. His stubbornness alone keeps him chained. The time for reconciliation has come. The newly-freed Titans, listening in the background, would have surely voiced their approval. If Zeus indeed grants him freedom, Prometheus agrees to reveal his secret. Gaia then departs for Olympus to plead with Zeus for his pardon.   

Hearing this motherly advice would not be easy for the pain-racked Prometheus. But he had foreseen in the earlier play that Zeus might grow milder and wish a reconciliation, and that Prometheus would then welcome him as a friend. Yet we have to wonder—how did Zeus acquire this insight? Divine introspection is possible but unlikely—we know from mythology this was not a god’s usual path to maturity.  Maybe it was through prophecy: perhaps Gaia, not averse to putting her thumb on fate’s scales, appeared to Zeus and prophesied his downfall unless he moderated his harshness and reached an accord with Prometheus. The Gaia-Prometheus dialogue would have been fascinating to read, but evidently the complexity of its ideas did not lend itself to short quotations. 

Whatever they discussed, the play’s events now move quickly.  Following  Gaia’s departure and a further choral song by the Titans, Heracles marches onto the stage, draped in a lionskin, a bow and quiver full of arrows slung over his shoulder. He tells the Titans he is passing through Caucasia on his trek northward to steal the apples of the Hesperides, the eleventh of his Twelve Labors. He wishes to ask Prometheus for advice on the route he must take and the dangers he will face. In return, Heracles promises to grant him any favor he requests.    

Prometheus answers Heracles in a lengthy “journey narrative,” a passage corresponding to his prophecy of Io’s wanderings in Bound. The account of Heracles’ travels contained colorful descriptions of foreign peoples and picturesque geographical details. As a result, several classical authors quoted passages from it. 

As Heracles journeys northward, Prometheus warns, he must face the North Winds:  

Take this straight road, where you will first encounter 
the gales of Boreas—there stay vigilant 
against the howling blizzards that can swiftly  
snatch men away like leaves in freezing whirlwinds…    

On the northern plains, Heracles will also meet 

…free-roaming Scythians fed on mare’s milk cheese…  

After the theft of the apples, further passages describe Heracles’ homeward journey.  His route takes him from the West through what is today southern France, then into the Italian peninsula.   

Prometheus describes the Ligures, a historically-documented people who inhabited the area in what is now northwestern Italy and southwestern France. They were known to be warlike, but Heracles, a favorite child of Zeus, travels with divine protection: 

…You then confront fearless Ligurian warriors, |
where, I foresee, your courage will desert you, 
your arrows prove too few, and where you cannot   
even throw stones, for the whole plain is smooth. 
Yet, pitying you, the Father will spread clouds 
above the land that drop a blanket of stones. 
Hurl these, and you will rout the Ligurian hordes.   

Heracles then meets “the Gabians,” perhaps a reference to the Gabii, a tribe that in Roman times lived in central Italy. Their life resembles a remnant of the Golden Age: 

…Thereafter you will meet a folk more righteous 
and more hospitable than any other, 
the Gabians, a people who require 
no plow or spade, no tool that breaks the earth,  
to raise crops, whose fields, self-sown without toil, 
ripen in bountiful harvests for mankind.   

In gratitude for this advice, Heracles grants Prometheus’ request to slay the eagle perched on the crags above them, the dramatic high point in what is primarily a speech-play. Putting an arrow on his bow and aiming carefully at the eagle, Heracles prays for divine aid: 

Archer Apollo, guide my arrow straight! 

Heracles’ arrow finds its target. The eagle drops. Heracles then unshackles Prometheus. After ages of bondage, Prometheus rises, freed. He thanks Heracles—and does not fail to note the irony that a son of Zeus has freed him: 

My fiercest foe has sired this dearest friend! 

Heracles departs, leaving the liberated Prometheus and the Titan Chorus to contemplate the implications of what has occurred. 

The play is nearing its conclusion. How did it end? Again no quotations exist, but other evidence helps us. The third century grammarian Athenaeus, in his encyclopedic banquet-tale Deipnosophistae, states that when Prometheus was freed from bondage, he agreed to wear a flower garland around his neck as atonement for the theft of fire.  Athenaeus relates this garland to a then-existing Athenian custom: “Aeschylus clearly states in the Unbound that in honor of Prometheus we place a garland on the shoulders as recompense of his bondage."  

Aeschylus’ trilogies often seem to have ended by linking the events of mythology to some current custom or ritual practiced in Athens. The events of the Oresteia, for example, concluded in the establishment of the law court of the Areopagus.  Athenaeus’ statement indicates the ending of the Unbound described the initiation of the “Prometheia,” the annual torch-festival in Athens honoring Prometheus.  Participants in the race carried torches symbolizing the gift of fire and wore a garland on their shoulders to commemorate Prometheus’ bonds.   

The proclamation of a festival would have culminated a speech announcing Prometheus’ pardon. Only Zeus could grant such a pardon, but the ruler of Olympus was too imposing a figure to be portrayed in a play. An emissary on his behalf was required. Hermes, the messenger god, performed this role at the end of Prometheus Bound. Moreover, if we assume the Medicean manuscript lists all the characters who appeared in Unbound, there is simply no other contender. His reappearance at the end of Unbound would make sense, too—it would be a dramatically effective way to bring the two plays full circle. 

Imagine, then, that Hermes now appears, still dutifully fulfilling Zeus’ bidding, but not as the sarcastic minion we saw in the first play. He might be wearing white robes of peace, holding a flower garland in his hands. He announces that Heracles killed the eagle and freed Prometheus at the order of Zeus. Prometheus has been punished enough. The civilizing arts Prometheus taught mankind made them a wise, worshipful race. Prometheus broke Zeus’ command by stealing fire, but his punishment is reduced to wearing a flower garland, which Hermes now ceremoniously places on Prometheus’ shoulders. To commemorate Prometheus’ story, an annual torch-festival in his honor will be held in Athens. The garland will be worn as a perpetual memorial of the theft and of Prometheus’ bonds. 

In a spirit of reconciliation, Prometheus now discloses the secret he withheld for so long. He warns that Zeus must abandon his desire for an affair with the nymph Thetis, because she is destined to give birth to a child greater than his father. Instead, Prometheus urges Zeus to marry Thetis to the mortal Peleus.  She will then give birth to a son named Achilles, who will become a famous hero. Prometheus then prophesies Achilles’ future glory in the Trojan War. Praising Prometheus for bravely enduring so many trials, Hermes departs for Olympus with this news. Prometheus’ final speech summing up his experiences would have been worth reading, if it had survived. The Titans sing a celebratory closing hymn as they and Prometheus slowly leave the stage.  

Conclusion

Perhaps someday an archaeologist in Egypt will unwind a mummy to find the complete text of Prometheus Unbound pasted inside its wrappings. Until that happens, we will have to use plausible conjecture and a bit of imagination to reconstruct this lost play. It does not end with the cosmic crash that concluded Prometheus Bound.  A battle for supremacy makes better theater than peacemaking.  Was this why Bound, and not Unbound, survived the ages?   

Unlike Shakespeare, though, “the play’s the thing” was not the operative principle for Aeschylean drama. He wrote for a religious festival, the City Dionysia. His plays were not just plays, but teaching tools in service of the state religion: they had to convey a moral. The Promethean plays orient themselves around the idea that beyond the chaos of events there is a cosmic order.  It is obscure, enigmatic, often harsh and destructive of individual hopes, but it exists. Prometheus Unbound tries to assure spectators that the fractured world of Bound was inevitably heading toward a better place. At the end of Unbound, the cosmic order reasserts itself.  The gods are just.  The system works.    

Though their tonality is completely different, Prometheus Bound and Prometheus Unbound are written like mirror reflections of each other. The chorus of both plays consists of sympathetic but ineffectual deities from the older generation: the Daughters of Oceanus and the Titans. The successive episodes parallel each other, too: Oceanus and Gaia, the older generation of gods come to console and counsel, the first brushed off, the second dutifully heeded; Io and Heracles, members of the post-Zeus generation bound on dangerous journeys, one abused and cast away by Zeus, the other his cherished, protected son; and the Janus-faces of Hermes, first a scornful lackey, then reflecting his master’s newfound mildness. Throughout both plays, except for the beginning and the end, Prometheus remains a monolith at the center of the action, receiving a succession of pilgrims to his rock. Omnipresent, too, though he never appears in either play, is the mighty shadow of Zeus.  

Beneath these surface resemblances, the two plays head in different directions. Bound was about the shattering of the cosmic order. It portrays one individual’s unequal struggle against tyrannical force, armed only with knowledge in confronting raw power. At the conclusion of the play, darkness falls, the story cuts off at mid-point, and the audience is left in an unjust world where brute force has gotten the upper hand.  The sequel play resolves these dissonances. From the entrance of the Titan Chorus, each succeeding scene is like a world waking up from a nightmare. Chaos begins to coalesce into recognizable shapes. For Zeus, this change occurs between the two plays; his new clemency is on display at the outset.  The Unbound focuses sharply on Prometheus’ awakening to this transformed world.   

In Bound, Prometheus was an outcast punished for violating the authority of Zeus. He admits in Bound that he committed a crime in stealing fire, but his defense is his compassion: his greater knowledge tells him there is an overarching morality transcending Zeus. Knowledge is his only weapon, so he openly flaunts knowing the secret of Zeus’ downfall.  In the amoral world of Bound, this only makes his situation worse.  Despite all he knows, Prometheus lacks the wisdom needed in his predicament: the patience to let events sort themselves out and the ability to know when to keep quiet. In I-told-you-so fashion, Oceanus reminds Prometheus in Bound that all his bragging changed nothing and only compounded the troubles he brought on himself. In the second play, I imagine Gaia, in a more subtle motherly way, reminding Prometheus that events were going to take their course regardless, things were destined to get better, all part of the master plan spun on the spindle of fate.  Why did he interfere?            

After ages of evisceration, Prometheus’ defiant spirit is now eroded by pain.  While he remained isolated on the rock, the world has inexorably moved toward justice without him. His superior moral stance is now self-isolating, his pride pointless, his continuing torments a product of his own stubbornness.  Confronted with Zeus’ olive branch, or rather, flower garland, Prometheus realizes there is no longer any logical reason to refuse a reconciliation.   

His freedom, though, comes only at the end of a harrowing gauntlet. As he said in Bound, “Only when I have been bowed by pains and unending torture, am I to escape my bondage.” Does this imply that his torments will ultimately transform knowledge into wisdom? Has the chained Titan, like Io and Heracles, been on his own dangerous journey? Prometheus has obtained new insight into the nature of things only after the catharsis of traveling the darkest depths of suffering—just as Dante could not ascend to Paradise until first passing through Inferno.  In this sense, Aeschylus’ Prometheus plays conclude not as a tragic cycle, but as a Commedia, where, after experiencing the worst, all finally turns out for the good. 

This is an ending some will find unsatisfactory. In the preface to his version of Prometheus Unbound, Percy Shelley asserted he could never complete the play the way Aeschylus intended. For him, Prometheus’ struggle for the rights of man was the moral center around which the universe revolved. His crime was like a poetic inspiration: the “Promethean fire” was its own law superseding any law of man or god. Zeus was irredeemable, a corrupt tyrant who deserved to be toppled. All this is an understandable viewpoint for a poet writing in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars and the unsatisfactory peace that followed. Aeschylus, on the other hand, could never justify a crime to his spectators, especially one against the king of gods. As Aeschylus saw it, Zeus had his zone of authority and the right to impose laws on gods and man.  The theft of fire, even from benevolent motives, was punishable.   

Then helping mankind was wrong? Technically, yes. This is a point where our post-Enlightenment ethical sensibilities will rebel a bit. Yet Aeschylean drama concerns the triumph of universal principles. The individual’s moral imperatives were subordinate to the larger demands of city, nationality, and the gods. In the Oresteia, Orestes killed his mother, his filial duty to his murdered father, but he is not absolved from the Furies’ wrath until acquitted by a lawful tribunal with Athena’s blessing.  The fire-thief, like the matricide, must act within a cosmic order that revolves in many concentric spheres. This order is pervasive enough to encompass Prometheus’ compassion for humanity and Zeus’ right to punish him for law-breaking—and to demand that Zeus exercise clemency in judging Prometheus. This moral ambiguity makes knowing the right course of action practically unfathomable for humans and even most gods, thus keeping the oracles in business. But this order did exist, and it was the cosmology that Aeschylus and his audience wished to see vindicated on the stage.  

At the conclusion of Prometheus Unbound is the concept that justice is built into the fabric of the cosmos, imposing a duty of moderation on Prometheus and Zeus. Zeus’ power and Prometheus’ foresight were intended to form a unity. Acting in opposition, they negate each other. The result is the opposite: impotence and ignorance careening toward disaster. Operating in unison, they become an unstoppable engine moving creation forward. This was a lesson highly relevant for fifth century Athens, after its miracle victory over the Persians and on the precipice of the hubris of the Peloponnesian Wars. Yet it is a theme that is pertinent for the discord of our own age, too. And for every age. 

That great idea is underscored in a final quotation attributed to the Unbound, words probably sung by the chorus in the celebratory conclusion of this lost play: 

When Strength links arms with Justice, 
            what mightier pair than this? 

Translations © Carey Jobe 

The Greek and Latin texts of the fragments of Prometheus Unbound translated in this article were taken from the Aeschylus and Cicero volumes of The Loeb Classical Library.   

Carey Jobe is a retired attorney and judge.  Prior to beginning his legal career, he was a student of Classical Literature and Latin Language.  His Latin translations have appeared in The Classical Outlook, the journal of The American Classical Society.  He is also a widely published poet whose work regularly appears in numerous literary journals.  He lives and writes near Tallahassee, Florida.   

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